Saturday, March 8, 2008

Obama's intelligence advisor has gone public, stating that Obama is wrong for voting against immunity for telecommunications companies that voluntarilly assisted the government to collect intelligence after 9-11.

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You can find the background on FISA and Obama's vote to strip out the telecom immunity provision here. This yesterday from The Blotter at ABC News:

In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program.

"I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the interview. "They were told to [cooperate] by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context."

"I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that's the right thing to do," added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama.

. . . Before leaving government to join the private sector, Brennan was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a joint office operated by the CIA, FBI and other government agencies.

Read the entire article. This has not been a good week for Obama. Yesterday was Susan Rice of Obama's foreign policy team asserting that he was unprepared to "answer the phone at 3 a.m." And the day before that was a NAFTA moment as his other adviser Samantha Power in what can only be described as a brutal BBC interview about Obama and his foreign policies, said Obama really didn't intend to withdraw from Iraq and had no plan in place to do so.